At last, the quintessential targeted reader of parterre.com has been identified. Undoubtedly, he is “Marc,” the subject of Angela Christlieb‘s documentary Naked Opera, who “travels the world to see Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni in which he finds the perfect representation of a life without compromise: intense and profound, full of love and passion.” Read more »

After 23 years, the Queen of Carthage has finally made it to Manhattan. On Wednesday night, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival hosted the Mark Morris Dance Group’s acclaimed 1989 production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at the Rose Theater, and Morris who created the double role of Dido and the Sorceress for himself and danced it exclusively for over a decade was there–this time as conductor–with Stephanie Blythe singing the two roles from the pit as she had done last fall in Berkeley. Read more »

La Cieca has obtained this photo of Thomas Hampson headlining Camouflage Night at Powerhouse, uh, rehearsing for Heart of a Soldier at the San Francisco Opera. You can tell the scene is Northern Rhodesia in 1962, because that is where the British military first started offering complimentary personal training packages to their troops.

La Cieca hears that parterre fave David Daniels will get all eponymous and stuff for a world premiere opera entitled Oscar, based on the life of Oscar Wilde, for Santa Fe Opera in 2013, with Opera Company of Philadelphia to follow. The work is to boast music by Theodore Morrison and a libretto and stage direction by John Cox.

“What I find bizarre is the insistence that no one—not the school, not Opera North, not the local education authority—is being homophobic. Instead, we have the strange position that, because the children are of primary-school age, these lines are too difficult and confusing for them.” The lines in question are “Of course I’m queer/That’s why I left here/So if you infer/That I prefer/A lad to a lass/ And I’m working class/ I’d have to concur.” [The Guardian]

You only thought the “Brokeback” Eugene Onegin was the gayest possible take on the Tchaikovsky “lyric scenes.” Now, along comes La Cieca’s fave director Stefan Herheim‘s extravagant, transgressive, high-camp symbolist (and about a dozen other adjectives) approach to the work, “gay” in the very best sense of gay sensibility. Video after the jump!

The ever-alert PR people at the English National Opera (why can’t we have a company like this?) have assembled a “what if?” video to promote Nico Muhly‘s impending Two Boys, and thrown in an admirably scruffy “reality” actor to boot.

The annual Duke of York’s Picturehouse Eurovision Party, which is apparently a gay institution in Brighton, is pre-empted this year because of demand for tickets for the Met’s HD of Die Walküre. [BBC News] (Voigt photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)